The question: Do we need faith to see religious art?
Launching two new books earlier this year, Sister Wendy Beckett said that, after 30 years of studying religious art, she has written "as a Catholic" for the first time, previously "never using religious language so as not to put off the atheists and the non-Christians". Having interpreted Christian art for a popular audience for decades, Beckett says she has finally "come out of the closet" to emphasise that these artworks can draw everyone to "something beyond, something other, and that something is God". Meanwhile, last week Pope Benedict espoused a similar view, speaking of the power of art to "express the faith and call us to a relationship with God". It seems that for these two Catholic thinkers, at least, the atheist has missed something fundamental if they fail to be inspired to faith by the religious art of the Christian tradition.
In the case of the subject matter of Beckett's book The Iconic Jesus, they may be on to something. The eastern icon is esoteric in its stark and naive style, but it is also alienating to the nonbeliever in its devotional function. As Beckett says "The whole point of the icon was that it was true" – it made the invisible divine visible through what was meant to be a wholly faithful physical representation. But further to this, in the tradition of acheiropoieta ("not made by human hand"), the ultimate "true" icons were believed to have been miraculously made – they were not simply representations, but rather holy objects to be treated as the very person they depicted. Icons of Christ were tangible evidence of the Word made flesh, and this is a spiritual meaning, which is redundant to the atheist.
However, Beckett's other recent book suggests the relevance religious art can have for us all, irrespective of faith. In The Art of Saints we encounter saints who are far from being unobtainable exemplars, but rather were individuals who, as the French novelist and lapsed Catholic Lucie Delarue-Mardrus wrote of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, suffered like the rest of us and battled "the little everyday dragons, more difficult to fight than the wild monster that Saint George defeated only once". Such portraits of holy people can lead us to reflect on the universal human experience – the common experiences that we all share – and this function can also extend to other genres of religious art.
A current exhibition at the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp underscores the universal reach of religious art. Featuring a group of 16th- and 17th-century altarpieces commissioned by trades guilds for the cathedral, here we find depictions of birth and death, joy and sorrow made for people bound together by the most earthly of concerns – work. Here the profane and sacred are intertwined. The Altarpiece of the Bakers shows the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, significant to Christians for showing Jesus as provider and as "the bread of life" but, as a tray of loaves takes centre stage and people eat hungrily in the background, this is an image that can also speak of physical want, the tyranny of bodily appetites, and the everyday struggle to put food on the table. That this is expressed through the religious tropes, which were the cultural language of the time, makes it no less pertinent to the non-Christian.
Even the most iconic of religious artworks can have profound meanings for the nonbeliever. Grünewald's depiction of the crucifixion on the Isenheim Altarpiece is one of the most wrenching in the history of western religious art, showing an apparently rotting Christ, his flesh pierced with thorns, his feet and hands horribly contorted. Here is an image that, for the Christian, emphasises the extreme sacrifice of the crucifixion, but here is also human suffering, disease and grief (powerfully depicted in Mary Magdalen's anguished hand-wringing and the Virgin's swoon). That it was painted for the hospital chapel of St Anthony's monastery in Isenheim, where those suffering from ergotism-induced gangrene were treated, underscores that it had more to say about body than soul to its intended observers.
Religious art, arguably like religion itself, ultimately deals with the trials of being human, and this is something those of all faiths and none can share in. The pope is right when he says that "art can express and render visible humanity's need to go beyond what one sees, revealing a thirst and quest for the infinite", but that "infinite" is the unfathomable in ourselves, whether we call that "God" or not.